13 comments

Dave, without meaning to sound like I am attacking you, it’s a bit ironic that you’re writing a post about being out of touch when it seems like you are quite out of touch yourself.

Advertising creatives don’t wear the most expensive clothes or eat in the nicest restaurants anymore. They certainly don’t drive the best cars or live in the nicest places. From what I understand, the best senior teams make £120,000 a year, with only a handful of outliers making much more. That’s definitely enough to raise a family comfortably in London. But to live in the lap of luxury? Not anymore. It certainly isn’t enough to afford the best of anything – at least not with any regularity.

And that’s people at the top. The rest of us are sharing a flat trying to scrape up enough for a deposit, shitting ourselves about the prospect of redundancy. No one should weep for us, people in much more worthy professions get paid much less. I’m certainly not complaining, but to say that we’re isolated from the glut of humanity by our economic circumstance is a perspective from the 1980s.

I agree that we live in a bubble. But it’s our social attitudes that make us different – not our money.

I met Peter Reeves at The Charlton Athletic Back to the Valley dinner. He was a great defender, always calm and collected. I was there when someone broke his leg in an accidental tackle which ended his career in football. I asked him what he did after that. He told me he worked for British Gas as a Gas fitter, God bless him. He was such a wonderful player to watch, and such a humble man at the table about his previous successes. There are plenty of people who have left advertising who are doing other things now, but you just don’t hear about them because advertising people are only interested in advertising people who are in advertising or are otherwise “successful”. The whole industry is geared like Hollywood to “success” (whatever that is) and like past footballers, I think many of them have a hard time adjusting to finding other ways of enjoying life with their clothes on because their souls become lost in meaningless “stuff.” Many bust their asses and never get recognised. Awards get stolen from their rightful owners, people get forgotten, or ignored. The industry doesn’t care about its own like other industries does. It’s dog eat dog, kill or die, and the problem with that, is the whole industry has become just one big self-liquidating promotion with nobody left who knows how to do it any more. They are all dead, left, or simply got fed up of all the lies.

I asked a top CEO once (who will remain nameless) , “Why did you leave such a fantastic job?” He replied: ‘Well, Kevin, it’s like this, I no longer was able to do the job I was hired for. I spent most of my time trying to work out who was telling lies and who was telling the truth.’ I totally understand him. The industry desperately needs THE TRUTH, but most of it just can’t handle it because it’s rotten to the core.

Jim’s comment rings very true. It’s very much a caste/location divide rather than a money divide (most creatives come from the middle to upper middle classes thanks to the fearsome barriers to entry into the profession, and if they don’t COME from the south east, they end up internalising it by living here for so long.) Not enough clients value creativity enough for there to be the kind of structural demand that sees any more than a sainted handful of teams earning one-percenters salaries these days…

If I went into the street and asked someone if they’d like to sit down and think up ideas for ads for £120k year I’d have a queue as long as Oxford Street who could do great ads. I pity the people who still work in the business. What fearsome barriers to entry are there? Coming up with ideas? It’s a luxury. It’s not work. It’s fun. Work is dealing with someone with a mental illness, getting kicked, bitten and punched for £7 an hour, or digging holes in the road when it’s tipping down with rain for £50 a day, or moving furniture in a dirty warehouse for £8 an hour, or nursing someone back to health when their family is screaming at you, or being punched and assaulted by a drunk when you are trying to keep law and order, or delivering goods in a van and getting covered in a puddle of mud by a passing car, or a husband looking after a wife dying of cancer. I don’t think enough creatives value reality at all and that is why nobody values creativity today. Creativity has become irrelevant and meaningless. Values have been destroyed. People are shallow and cowardly. Nobody wants to know and cares even less. This is what has to be changed. I just told this to a bunch of Russians in Moscow. You want to know what reality is like for most of the world, it’s shit, and nobody acknowledges it because they don’t know how to do it any more because the whole “LUVVY DUVVY” “Internet thing” of I’ll be your friend…bla… bla…bla… then 2 weeks later…”SURPRISE!” I really just wanted to sell you this crappy product” comes to the fore and everything you have worked your nuts off for falls flat on it’s face because THERE IS NO CREDIBILITY. As David Ogilvy once said: ‘Respect the intelligence of your public. She is as intelligent as your wife.’

If I’m not mistaken, I think Dave was famous – or was it infamous – for starting his guys off on four grand a year as a standard rate. Of course, once they proved they could deliver, he increased the salary accordingly. And people were willing to take pay cuts to join GGT. (I would have been one of them but I simply couldn’t afford to support myself in London at that price…)

Hi Conor,
Well remembered, it was actually £6k starting salary during the trial period.
But everyone moved pretty quickly, either up or out – no one stayed on £6k.
Some other agencies were surprised when they tried to hire our guys how much they were paid.
When our guys left after a few years they usually became ECDs or opened their own agencies.

To be fair, Dave offered 17.5k to new teams at CST. I think that was a fair salary at the time. I was out of work and was prepared to work for that at his place but I was told he wanted kids. I can understand that. It was how he kept the place young and fresh. That was the business strategy, and it worked. The business strategy nowadays seems to be not creativity but alogrithms. Companies don’t want people with ideas. They just want people who process the material like a mincing machine. God it must be so fucking boring! I can’t do that. Soon they will not even need that. Everything will work on RFID chips. There will be no new products. There will only be reordering. Creativity is dead. Ideas are dead. Nobody wants ideas any more. As Stalin used to say; ‘Ideas are dangerous’ and we all live in a very dangerous world now. I pray to God it will improve for the better. As for writing my own blog, the reason I don’t do that is because every job I have ever had other than working at Saatchi & Saatchi, and my own company, I got bored with in 6 months because I had solved every challenge within that timeframe. Loads of people string it out and make a lot of money that way but I cannot do that. It’s the way I am. If there is no challenge I get bored. This is the challenge of the 21st century. How to prevent the human race from getting bored senseless out if their little skulls, because let’s be honest, life is dull without a challenge.